I apologize for not posting this here until now, but there's still time left for this auction!

Want a fully customized holiday card to send to your friends and family, but lack a design? This auction is for a hand drawn holiday card image featuring your personal characters so you can spread the holiday cheer in a unique way.

The opening bid amount is for a single character against a winter wonderland background drawn in Corel Painter. Natural scenes only please (no buildings or machinery), but you are free to make suggestions on what you would like (holiday decorations, winter, trees, ice). If the bidding reaches $120 you may add a secondary character. If the bidding reaches $250 you may add a third character to the image. The maximum character allowance for this auction is 3 characters.

You will receive a preliminary sketch of your image for your approval. You get three free change phases in sketch form (this is per revision round, so if you have multiple changes to make in the first round, this doesn't count as all three changes, for example. I will send it back to you a maximum of three times and you can make as many changes as you want within that turn). Additional changes past this will cost $20 each. Once the image is colored, you can make minor changes (such as minor marking/coloration changes, forgotten accessories, etc, but no major changes such as pose will be accepted, as it is the buyer's responsibility to approve this in sketch form).

You will be emailed the high resolution digital image which is 5"x7" at 300 DPI. This auction is for the image service only. Printing duties are for the buyer to handle, but I can suggest Tugrik at Monoceros Media (tugrik@gmail.com) for high quality printing services if you want an excellent paper selection at competitive prices.

Turnaround is approximately 1 month, so you can have adequate time to have your cards printed and mailed before the holidays.

I draw clean art only, please refer to my FA page for more samples of my work. If you have any questions please direct them to thornwolf227@gmail.com and I will get back to you promptly.

I've been trying for ten minutes to bid on this, and Furbuy is continuously thwarting me. Whatever the issue is with their bidding system, I cannot fathom. I have to give up and go on with my life. Hopefully I'm the only one whose bidding attempts have been thus stymied; however, it wouldn't surprise me if the very affordable price where bidding currently sits is entirely due to a crappy system. Best of luck!

They should have received a message about WHY the system was not permitting them to bid, that would be preeminently helpful in determining if there is indeed any issue. Oddly enough, we have not received any reports of problems in the bidding system, and have not changed any of the code in it for weeks now. Plus we have a full system testing program that checks and validates all features and functionality of the site daily. If you can, please either have those people contact us with more details about their bidding issues, or collect that information and pass it on to us. Thanks,

Thanks for getting in touch with the powers-that-be! I got it sorted out on my own eventually, though not by following the instructions I was given.

The system did not work as advertised, and I had not the time to follow up on it yesterday. But I should not have used the word "crappy" up there. It was cranky and hasty (and borderline juvenile), and perhaps for that alone I deserve a testy response from the folks who work hard to connect us consumers to you artists.

So uh, how exactly is it "thwarting" you? Seeing as I coded the bidding system and am the current maintainer and check the nightly user-tests against the code (which have all come back 100% in the clear for the last several months now), perhaps I can help. What, exactly, is the error message you are receiving when you attempt to place a bid? And, well, sorry to be so frank but, why didn't you contact us about the issue? If worse comes to worst, you can always ask us to place a bid FOR you - we do have the capability and system in place to do that.

I appreciate you trying to help and I appreciate your prompt reply but please be a bit more courteous to people on my journal. I use this journal primarily as advertisement for my art and services and they are my customers and I don't want them to feel at all uncomfortable. Private messages and emails I think would be best for further discussion. I gave Gatcat your contact email for Furbuy and he is welcome to contact you from there if he feels it fit and is indeed set on bidding, which is up to him.